Posts Tagged: religion

Sometimes I envy Absalom. He had recourse. He had power. He raised up an army in his rage. He did something. He turned his rage into an insurrection. All I’ve ever done is turn my anger into words. How can a sister avenge her sister?

Salman Rushdie, no stranger to controversy, now finds himself under scrutiny from a different sort of institution: the Times Literary Supplement. Michael Caines, writing for TLS, takes issue with Rushdie’s recent use of the word “medieval” in a statement made about the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

We’re only a few centuries and a small apocalyptic event away from isolated communities of huddled believers worshipping the gospels of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Le Guin….Let’s not think about L Ron Hubbard.

In the Guardian, Damien Walter argues that science fiction is the religion of the future.

What I should have learned back then, but did not, and in fact took at least another twenty years to fully learn, is that such claims are not at all about “demonic power,” “demonic possession,” or even “the Devil,” but are actually about demonization.

I think I was pretty nervous about it as a kid. I think I did [have] that fear of the world coming to an end. I think also it’s kind of how kids exist anyway, you know? You’re always fearing change; you’re always fearing the wrath of a parent; you’re always fearing that something is going to go wrong somewhere.

I realized that there were these others, these priests and clergy I always regarded as opponents, but they were on my side, and we were all wrestling with a narrative that didn’t work, a meaninglessness, a loss of sense—in fact, the germ of the book was my own surprise, at the death of my great lovely partner Jeff, when I rushed to the church to find something to salvage from that bonfire.

In an interview with Jonathan Lee at The Paris Review, Joshua Ferris addresses why his new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, “starts from the question of whether there’s a kind of private language and intimacy to religion that the mutt-y white guys like [him] are missing out on.” More personally, he worries, too, if “as a writer there’s something [he] missed out on” not growing up with a religious sensibility:

… religion offers a writer a tradition both to be nurtured in and to fight against, and that nurturing and that conflict can produce great literature.

I like to imagine him out there on his beast of burden, vast grey country on all sides and a book of poetry open in his hand. It is a romantic image and, when I think only of it, I can almost forget why he was there....more

What I remember most about church is all the sitting, standing, and kneeling, the stink of incense, the calm of the priest’s voice, the hard wooden pews, and not really understanding why every Sunday, I found myself, alongside my family, in the same place, mindlessly repeating prayers by rote.

My dad smells like myrrh. My younger sister Madeline and I hide beneath his robes while he shakes parishioners’ hands at the back of the church. We think we’re hidden, but people can see our shiny Mary Janes. And of course, there’s the giggling.

"Currently, about 35% of our nation self-identifies as Evangelical…not wanting to understand the Evangelical culture in our current political climate is a bit like not wanting to understand, say, the Mexican-American community in the middle of the immigration debates." ...more

“You have a demon inside of you that is making you gay,” she stammered quietly. “I know because I used to have a demon that gave me a gluten intolerance. But then I, uh, prayed and God cast it out.”...more

In Jeff Sharlet’s latest book about religion in America, Sweet Heaven When I Die, “religion” is something protean and heterodox.

The actress Vera Farmiga, whom you may know from Up in the Air or, possibly, the great guilty-pleasure of 2009, The Orphan, directed a movie called Higher Ground, which came out last year. It may or may not have pinged your radar; there was a decent press push, because actress-turned-director is a nice hook for journalists.

It all happened quickly. I began praying to Krishna: a blue boy playing a flute to a herd of sheep on a green hill, a small boy with a peacock feather in his hair and beads around his neck, lotus in bloom almost everywhere.

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